Selling products online is not only for big businesses. Small businesses and individuals also have the opportunity to make money in the world of e-commerce, which has continued to grow in recent years.
Even though there are plenty of opportunities for individuals and small businesses to make money through e-commerce, one of the major challenges for most online shops is simply getting people to visit the site. While visitors don’t produce any revenue unless they are buying, without them you are sure to be unsuccessful.
For this reason we will now take a look at a number of different things you can start doing today to increase traffic at your e-commerce site.
1. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
If you are looking for a cost-effective way to get exposure to your site, you should consider pay-per-click (PPC) ads. With PPC you can determine how much money you want to spend and what types of visitors you want to attract.
With PPC you can use optimized ads that will market to people who are searching for what you have to offer. Because you can control who sees your ads and how much you want to spend, it’s very possible to get a good bang for your buck with PPC.
One reason PPC is so popular is that it can work on any budget. If you only have a small amount to spend each month, you can set your maximum and ads will not be displayed after that point. If you have a bigger budget, you can set up more campaigns and keywords.
2. Banner Ads
Another type of popular online advertising is banner ads. Banners are generally not as highly targeted as PPC ads, but if you carefully place your ads on the right sites you can reach a rather targeted audience.
The price of banners will vary greatly depending upon factors like the amount of traffic and impressions (how many times the ad appears), the size of the ad, the placement on the page, the number of ads on the site, etc.
3. Start an Affiliate Program
One way to get more people to your site without making much of an investment in advertising is to be willing to share the revenue with others who help you to make sales. With an affiliate program, other website owners can sign up and start sending visitors to your site. If one of those visitors makes a purchase at your site it will be tracked and recorded automatically and the affiliate will get a specified portion of the sale.
A good affiliate program will produce monetary results for you and for those who are promoting your products. The percentage of revenue that is paid out to affiliates will vary greatly, but generally electronic products that can be downloaded will have the highest commissions (sometimes as much as 50% – 75% of the sale will go to the affiliate).
4. Blogging
If you are struggling to get people to visit your e-commerce site, consider adding a blog to the site. Blogs are great for marketing and traffic generation because they keep fresh content on the site, they gradually add to the number of pages on the site, and they can help to produce search engine traffic as well as repeat traffic.
Blogging on your own site is not the only option here. In addition, you can write guest posts for other blogs and benefit from the exposure that it provides. If a blog’s audience is a good fit with the target audience of your e-commerce site you can write an article and include a link back to your site.
5. Email Newsletter
Many successful e-commerce sites make an effort to build up a database of email newsletter subscribers. This way there is always an easy way to spread the word about your sales and your new products. If you don’t already have an email list, you should start one as soon as possible.
Great post on ecommerce. Very helpful and imformative. Thanks!
Internet Marketing Alternatives
Some other things you can do to increase the exposure of not only your ecommerce store, but your products is to submit your product feeds to shopping portals like Shopping.com, ShopZilla, or even Google Base.